Our neighborhood has a monthly bulk trash pickup where people can put anything they don’t want on the curb and the city will haul it away. Since, as everyone knows, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, it pays to scout along the curb on trash day to see what can be “recycled”. In the past couple of years, we’ve found a bunch of good stuff. The best:
[ul][li]a solid oak, beveled glass front door, ~90 years old (architectural salvage places charge loads for old doors. And it’ll fit on our front door, if I ever get around to putting it on…),[/li][li]a small hand-knotted oriental rug,[/li][li]a leaded glass window,[/li][li]an art pottery vase,[/li][li]scads of unused 1950s vintage bark cloth (pricey if you want to buy it!),[/li][li]two twisted-leg antique oak chairs,[/li][li]a front-porch glider (minor repair + little paint = good as new!),[/li][li]1950s ash bentwood 3-section sofa,[/li][li]vintage 1950s dresses,[/li][li]a Victorian couch that we had to leave and return for and someone else picked it up! ARG! I saw it first![/li][li]a solid maple desk chair,[/li][li] a small oak commode[/ul][/li]My wife points out that she’s almost scared to invite people over, since they might recognize their old stuff.
My best find was a beautiful antique couch in great shape. Why do people throw away perfectly good things? I’ll never understand.
I rarely go “garbage-picking” but if I do, I always grab tons of stuff for charity. Why let it go to the dump when there are so many needy people and it’s perfectly good stuff?
Not much, myself (best was probably the wooden wagon, pre-little-red-wagon era, that we salvaged as kids)…
… but my grandmother and great-grandmother got a Paul Revere silver porringer (porridge bowl for children? small bowl with ornate handle) from picking through the leavings in an alley… and by ‘Paul Revere porringer’, I mean, made by the man himself, not by the company. It is now happily ensconced in a museum, donated after having been appraised at about as much as my mom ever made in a single year.
I also used to work for a couple of guys who were definitely the most amazing dumpster divers I’ve ever seen… they furnished whole houses (which they renovated themselves) with turn-of-the-century-to-1930’s furniture, oriental rugs, player pianos (TWO of them!), old phonographs, beautiful art, lamps, and so forth, almost exclusively dumpster (or ‘large item curb pickup’ day) retrievals. Sigh, oh, to have that touch!
My neighbor’s old drapes. The tops and hem edges had frayed, but they were floor-to-ceiling types, and contained yard upon yard of beautiful pale moss green silk satin - fabric that would have cost me at least $90 a yard to buy. I used it to reupholster a couch, loveseat, and club chair that I found under a freeway overpass.
I did get caught retrieving the drapes, so now that neighbor looks at me oddly, but my living room is gorgeous.
Not quite the quality level of some things posted here, but living in a college town makes dumpster diving really easy.
*two kitchen tables (when I found the 2nd I hauled the 1st one out to the curb, it was gone in half an hour)
*2 arm chairs (one we used, one I gave to a friend)
*a bookcase
*a really nice entertainment center that unfortunately didn’t fit in my car so we had to abandon
*a smaller entertainment center
*2 coffee tables
*a full-length wall mirror
Since moving I haven’t found as much, but just this weekend I got a nice wooden headboard. I’d been putting off buying one until I was somewhere I knew I wouldn’t be moving from for a good long while, but if it’s free it’s easy to justify.
I think our neighborhood might be a little above-average in terms of good trash because the whole neighborhood is historic 1910s houses, and most residents are either senior citizens who’ve been living here for years (and accasionally pitch out some of that ugly old furniture) or young couples who’ve just bought (and then clear out all the crap stored in the attic).
I dunno either. Every month we’ll see a lot of good stuff that we don’t happen to have a use for, but you know SOMEONE would (if we picked up all the kitchen tables we’ve seen…). Luckily, there seem to be a lot of other pickers, both professional and amateur, that grab most of the useable stuff.
Have you ever invited your neighbor over for tea? Personally, I think it would be cool to introduce your neighbor to the reincarnation of his drapes, but my wife thinks it’s a little embarassing.
ARG! This is what happened to us with the Victorian sofa last month. We made the mistake of going the rounds in my Civic instead of my wife’s truck. By the time we drove six blocks and switched vehicles, the sofa was gone.
My twisted sense of humor would get in the way. I wouldn’t be able to have him in for tea unless I could get my hands on his own old cups to serve him from. And maybe some suspicious-looking teabags. Mwaahaha!
Mr. Seawitch and I recently acquired a truck. Should we run across a sofa while driving my car, we’ll profit from your experience - one of us will have a seat on the sofa while the other goes back to switch cars.
A quad-processor IBM server. It was only missing the RAID controller. Too bad it was all PII-233 processors, but what the hey, and besides, hedra got here first with the story of the Revere Porringer our maternal ancestors retrieved from the garbage.
A huge hardcover book about the US presidents up to Carter. It contained just about every piece of trivia about each president you can cram in a book. Just about the perfect reference book. Unbelievable. Damn I wish I still have it.
This is pretty funny for me to be reading this thread, since I just found this item over the weekend - an old ColecoVision, with games and one joystick. I found it in the garbage that was apparently the stuff my neighbors didn’t sell at a garage sale - it still had a price tag on it, as did a bunch of other stuff in there. Took it home, plugged it in, hooked it up to my TV-as-monitor w/some old DIN cable, and it worked. It’s got Looping, Venture, Donkey Kong, Cosmic Avenger and Omega Race.
Of course, my wife would disagree that it’s the “best” thing I’ve ever found, since I spent the rest of Labor Day weekend playing it…it was great firing up Cosmic Avenger and hearing that awesome opening music…
One of the bookstores near my office threw out a whole bunch of brand-new but obscure books in an alley. I grabbed a bunch, donated a bunch to our Friends Of The Library book sale.
What breaks my heart is that my husband’s parents are thrower-outers. They discard anything and everything. My husband’s old beer can collection, his brother’s radio-controlled car models, their drum set, a frickin’ million of his nana’s old things. I am sure people cruising the streets of their posh neighborhood thought they’d died and gone to heaven those mornings.
The last time Nana moved to a yet a smaller place, I insisted we go over and see what they were getting rid of. Of particular interest was a “sort of crappy old chair” (according to hs parents). I wanted it immediately for its quartersawn oak and arts & craft styling, even though the original upholstery was a big ugly. My husband’s brother took the matching rocker. We got it home and I started to look at it more closely and realized it’s Stickley Brothers. Not Gustav Stickley alone, which would be worth a load, but still a very decent brand. This is exactly what they would have dumped on the curb, and god knows what they’ve dumped in prior years.
I got a 1-wheeled 3-speed bike that cleaned up ok.
I got a monitor that I still use as a second desktop, which sounds cooler than it is, since I seldom do two things at once. I guess it’s for if you were debugging a running program?
I’ve gotten secretary chairs.
I got a Hoover upright. Its only problem was a wad of carpet fibers knotted around the wheels. Works great now.
I’ve saved stuff from the trash a few times. At the school I work for they have been getting rid of ancient computers, each usually have a 33 mhz processor or a 66, with 250 meg hard drives, ISA nics and sound cards. Too old and slow to be useful but still fun to just tinker with. At the post office in Columbus, OH where my dad works for they throw away nice stuff. Just today he came home with a SCSI hard drive. Just wish he would have taken the scsi card too, I only have an old ISA scsi card that I saved last year. My dad has a habit of throwing away good stuff…MY STUFF! He threw away my nice leather chair b/c it had a rip. I was pissed off b/c I had an identical chair that didn’t have rips but the arms were broken. I could have swapped parts and had a brand new chair.
As Homer Simpson once said, “Dig down deep…all the good stuff is in the garbage juice.”